Articles Posted by niksilver

Recent blog entries by niksilver

It was interesting to read the
OSDN/BCG survey
of open source developers, suggesting that most are
professionals
spending about a day per week on one particular project.
Also interesting comparing that with our own experience,
in which we do have a number of developers from the open
source community but certainly not fitting the profile
suggested by OSDN and BCG.

But on closer examination it's not that surprising. The
population
sampled was those who are named developers on various
Sourceforge projects. And usually these people are the
people
whose baby it was in the first place. So it's very likely
that
these people will spend an hour a week on the project... and
surprising they don't spend longer. If they surveyed us
they'd
find a bunch of full time developers working 40+ hours/week.

In my experience those who come to a project later spend
much
less time on it. Not too surprising. We have a handful of
contributors who spend maybe 4hrs/week coding various
segment. More significant projects therefore are unlikely to
get off the ground. Our
Storix project
is a lot fo work for one person, even though the idea of it
ahs generated much interest. So I've created much smaller
projects (sometimes well-defined bugfixing or feature
enhancements) such as the
Swing front end to launcher, our command line management
tool. This is a postive benefit, but also a very
well-defined
and medium-sized task.

I note that
Miguel de Icaza says
Evolution had 17 developers at its peak. So Jtrix, with its
full time
staff plus sundry others isn't doing too bad compared to a
high
profile, easily-understood, less ambitious project like
that.

Fascinating
article in The Register today about how Miguel de Icaza
wants to port GNOME to .NET, and generally make this the
platform of the future. It's fascinating to hear this, and
has
some relevance to our own project,
Jtrix.

.NET is about SOAP and it's about portable bundles of code
("assemblies").
Jtrix is still about a lot more than that, but it's good to
hear
someone recognise .NET's assemblies. I don't know too much
about them, but from what MdI says their security features
are much like setting Java's security policies. These work
fine
for Java applets, but I can see this
being quite inadequate for practical purposes, and one will
end up enabling all features because application-style
programs
(as opposed to applet style programs) need them. And then
your
system is compromised.

Additionally, I can see that all useful
Windows applications will be platform-specific by addressing
memory direct. .NET allows this and it will render a Linux
MONO
less useful than one would like.
James Gosling noted this some time ago in
an interview with News.com.

Jtrix runs everything in its own code space, and resources
(e.g. disk)
are kept entirely separate. Its aim is allow you to use your
own
PC as a commercial hosting environment. You need complete
security for that. So it's nice to see people recognise the
general
idea, but it's a shame to see them focus their attention on
what
is, IMHO, a misguided direction.

Writing a small Beatrix application of my own. Just a small
demo, but should help others see how things work. It also
helps me see how things work, and how to improve my
documentation. Some errors are just silly. Some require
a bit more detective work, and that shouldn't be necessary
for this kind of application. It means there are some gaps
in my documentation. So all in all a good exercise.

Spent some time filling in the gaps in the Beatrix
documentation, which appear to be large. The information
is all there, but sometimes you need to be a bit of a
detective
to piece it all together. CryoBob suggested
a kind of Q&A table, mapping "What do you want to do?" to
"How to do it". That's a good idea and can act as a good
reference.
What you want to do (in human terms) doesn't always map to
single class or interface. It's usually split up over
several. So
having a handy reference is a very good idea.

Among other things, yesterday I spoke to Jim, our CTO, about
a very small class he has in mind to help make legacy
systems
available as Jtrix services. It's quite simple and very
elegant.
It involves setting a few fields in one class which then
gives you
a warrant for someone to access the service. The class then
starts an HTTP server listening for a service bind request.
This
will come when you give the warrant to someone and they use
it in a netlet. At this point your legacy application can
talk
to the netlet. Very simple. Requires a little bit of work,
but
should open up Jtrix even more.